Composer Mark Orton (The Good Girl, 12 Mighty Orphans, My Old Lady, Love Hard) is reuniting with director Alexander Payne (The Descendants, Election, Sideways) on the upcoming comedy drama The Holdovers. The film starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph & Dominic Sessa is set in the early 1970s and follows a universally disliked professor at a prep school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go and forms an unlikely bond with one of them. David Hemingson (Whiskey Cavalier, Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23) wrote the screenplay and is also producing the Miramax production with Mark Johnson (The Chronicles of Narnia, Breaking Bad) and Bill Block (Halloween, Fury, Bad Moms). Orton has previously collaborated with Payne on the director’s 2013 feature Nebraska and also composed the Payne-produced 2020 movie The Last Shift. The Holdovers is scheduled to be released in select theaters on October 27, 2023 by Focus Features before expanding nationwide on November 10.
Orton’s other recent projects include Ray Romano’s feature directorial debut Somewhere in Queens, which opened in theaters this spring and has just been released on VOD last month.
